Over the years they have floundered at or near the bottom of the NHL standings, the Edmonton Oilers have started to build up an impressive core of young talent. Cult of Hockey colleague Jon Willis detailed this group of early-career players the other day when he speculated about the Oilers’ five-year plan, 2013 edition. In the shortened 2013 season they proved to be not quite ready for prime time, but collectively they showed all sorts of promise.

But what lies beneath? At the forward positions, the support group of veteran role players assembled by former GM Steve Tambellini weren’t up to the task, providing little in the way of tough-minutes shelter or secondary scoring. On the day he took over the job on April 15, Craig MacTavish addressed this deficiency in no uncertain terms with this rather damning comment:

“We had a lot of guys that the best they were going to be in any given game was a non-factor.”

Ouch. Sounds like a problem, all right.

Rob Vollman’s Player Usage Charts show how little Ralph Krueger was able to rely on his bottom six:

Four key pieces of info embedded here: the size of each player’s “bubble” reflects even-strength ice time per game, Quality of Competition is plotted vertically, and Zone Start horizontally: three of the key choices at the coach’s option in player deployment. The colour of that bubble is suggestive of the player’s actual performance within that role. The chosen key stat is Corsi Relative, essentially, shot differentials when a player is on-ice vs. off; within the context of his team, how much (and in which direction) does he tilt the ice? Brown is bad, blue is good, and the deep blue of the Oilers’ top three is very good indeed.

For clarity I set the threshold at 24 GP, half of the shortened season. Exactly 14 forwards achieved this, although I will address some of the others a little further down.

The key dimension is the vertical axis, which stratifies the forwards by their quality of competition. This is a blend of both Krueger’s own ideas of best match-ups, and those of his counterpart. Each has the last change on home ice, while both have the ability to try to match on the fly. In the case of the Oilers it paints a clear picture of who Krueger wants on the ice against the opposition’s best, and vice versa.

From the top down, first thing we see at upper right is power against power, where Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Taylor Hall, and to a lesser extent Jordan Eberle faced the opposition’s best, at least by this metric. (Like string theory, there are many different variations of QualComp; my own preference is the ‘Corsi Relative’ version, which measures opponents’ on-ice shot-differentials against their own teammates.) Despite facing the best the opposition had to offer, the Pipe Line carried the play, outshooting the other guys by a very nice margin and their own teammates by a lot more. Among them they accounted for 36 goals.

Next comes a cluster of five forwards — from top to bottom, Ales Hemsky, Sam Gagner, Shawn Horcoff, Nail Yakupov, and Magnus Paajarvi — who hovered fairly close to facing average competion. All of them, however, saw the play going the wrong way a tad too often, judging by those brown-ish circles. Still, as a group that fivesome accounted for 56 goals.

At this point there emerges a huge gap in the “Vollman Slegehammer” below which the bottom six settles out. The sextet of Eric Belanger, Lennart Petrell, Ryan Smyth, Ryan Jones, Jerred Smithson, and Mike Brown spreads out nicely from left to right showing their differing responsibilities in defensive zone assignments, but all six guys had a couple things in common: all faced far below average QualComp, and none of them could score a lick. Collectively this sextet accounted for nine (9) goals all year: 3 for Petrell, 2 each for Smyth and Jones, 1 each for Smithson and Brown, and none at all for Belanger.

Now I’ll grant you I’m not accounting for the 2 goals scored by Smithson (2) and Brown (0) in a combined 47 games they played for other teams early in the season; suffice to say these guys had already proven they can’t score before they were acquired. They seem to have been brought in to address other deficiencies, such as grit, crust, jam and assorted food stuffs. Brown in particular stands out at the extreme lower right of the graph for his severely limited role: least ice time, protected Zone Starts, ultra-weak competition, and terrible shots results. The latter extended to the scoreboard where his -8 (2 goals for, 10 against) was the worst goal differential of any Oilers foward … in under four hours of ice time.

One thing for sure, those guys weren’t brought in to take on tough competition. Look at the upper left portion of that PUC and note the void in the “shutdown” quadrant. The big-ticket vets, Horcoff and Hemsky, were nibbling at the boundaries at least, but judging by all those brown circles the rest were not only playing weak opposition, they were getting owned on the shot clock in the process.

The price to be paid for that lack of shutdown forwards is that by mathematical necessity it leaves little space in the “sheltered” quadrant to unleash talented youngsters like Yakupov, Paajarvi, and Gagner. Coach Krueger was able to give those guys a bit of a boost in Zone Starts but they didn’t get to do so against “the soft” as is the ideal for a second scoring line. They were able to score, but the other guys scored more.

Let’s take a look at those on-ice shot metrics, which are fairly shocking. While all three of the right-most columns tell a similar tale, I’ve sorted by Corsi On, the differential of shot attempts for and against per 60 minutes of ice time.

[** Behind the Net stats for Brown and Smithson include their time in Toronto and Florida respectively.]

In rendering the table I’ve eschewed brown for the more traditional red, as in “sea of”. That’s what wallows below the top three, as every other Oiler forward saw the team badly outshot — by over five shots on goal and by double-digits shots at goal — for every 60 minutes they were out there.

A lot of this difference occurred at the good end of the ice. The Pipe Line were far ahead of the pack in shots generated, with all of them in the mid-30s in that department while their teammates tended into the mid-20s or worse. While the relationship to actual goal differentials isn’t a straight-line one, it’s hardly a surprise that two of the three plus players in the Oilers forward crew were Hall and RNH; of the rest only Horcoff foiled the percentages to finish in the black. (The captain wound up with a team-leading +8, as it seemed some of the luck that had gone against him in this particular stat in recent years bounced in his favour in 2013.) The rest were minus players, and deservedly so.

One notable was Teemu Hartikainen, not shown above because he missed the Games Played threshold, but worth a mention here. Hartikainen played a shade under 200 minutes at even strength, during which time the Oilers failed to score a single goal! They allowed 8 in that time, giving Harti the dubious distinction of tying Brown for the worst plus/minus among this sorry group of depth forwards. The big Finn’s failure to make the next step was one of the biggest disappointments of the season.

Another was Anton Lander, whose ill-timed injury limited him to 11 games, but who also was not on the ice for a single Oilers goal at even strength. Chris VandeVelde performed poorly in his own call-up, as reinforcements from Oklahoma City contributed precious little to the Oilers cause in 2013. Meanwhile, Ben Eager and Darcy Hordichuk played so poorly here in Edmonton that both were soon OKC-bound. Add it all up and that’s five more players who contributed all of 2 goals and a net -20 in a combined 63 games. Add that to the 6 guys previously identified and you have 235 GP spread among 11 players, who among them scored 11 goals. That’s over 20 games per player, with an average of exactly one goal each. It was ugly, folks.

It seems clear from MacTavish’s comments that there will be substantial change in the bottom six (or “bottom half of the roster” if you prefer) in 2013-14. Of the eleven depth forwards identified above, five of them — Smyth, Belanger, Eager, Brown and Lander — have contractual commitments through next season, but none of them is safe from being moved along in the off-season. Among them, only Lander appears to fit in the longer-term picture beyond 2014, and I’ll be surprised if MacTavish doesn’t move at least two of the other four sooner than that.

The pacts of five others — Jones, Petrell, Smithson, Hordichuk, VandeVelde — are effectively expired, with all of them eligible to be unrestricted free agents. While a case can be made in favour of this individual or that as a not entirely useless useful depth player, I’m not sure any one of them can be considered even-money to return in 2013-14. Collectively, I’d be surprised to see more than one of the five in training camp.

Then there’s Teemu Hartikainen. The lone RFA in this group has come to the end of his entry-level contract. After ending each of his two previous regular seasons getting a good look and good vibes with the big club, the muscular Finn was rather pointedly sent down to OKC with mere days remaining this time around, in one of MacTavish’s first moves after taking over as GM. After a disappointing campaign in the NHL but another real solid half-season and playoffs in the AHL, the fear is Harti is the latest version of the so-called “AAAA” player, guys that hit it out of the park in Triple A but can’t quite handle the split-fingered fastball that the big leaguers bring. That said, he is so close, and potentially fills such a gaping hole in the collective skill set, that I expect him to be qualified and brought back. With no waiver options, it’ll be time for Teemu to fish or cut bait and prove he’s at least an NHL-calibre bottom sixer.

One thing’s for sure, the organization needs a few of those. Because the ones they had this year didn’t so much cut the mustard as cut the cheese. MacTavish may well conclude that the best possible option is to air out the room.

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